Author: Tomas Rutkauskas

I am trying to work out how to store approximately 1000 lines of text (3 columns, 
30 chars each) inside an application. I want to read the values and then display 
them in a TStringGrid and do some further manipulation.

Answer:

If you want to read the data into a stringgrid a way to do that without building a 
class around the resource data would be this. You start by placing the data into a 
file and the file into a resource as detailed in Tip Number 1004. Loading this data 
into a TStringGrid would work like this:

1   
2   procedure LoadResourceIntoGrid(grid: TStringGrid);
3   var
4     rs: TResourceStream;
5     numElements: Integer;
6     datarec: TFileData;
7     i: Integer;
8   begin
9     rs := TResourceStream.Create(hInstance, 'FILEDATA', RT_RCDATA);
10    try
11      numElements := rs.Size div Sizeof(numElements);
12      grid.Perform(WM_SETREDRAW, 0, 0);
13      try
14        grid.RowCount := numElements + 1; {assuming a header row}
15        {following assumes grids colcount has been set correctly already}
16        for i := 1 to numElements do
17        begin
18          rs.ReadBuffer(datarec, sizeof(datarec));
19          grid.Cells[grid.FixedCols, i] := datarec.col1;
20          grid.Cells[grid.FixedCols + 1, i] := datarec.col2;
21          grid.Cells[grid.FixedCols + 2, i] := datarec.col3;
22        end;
23      finally
24        grid.Perform(WM_SETREDRAW, 1, 0);
25        grid.Invalidate;
26      end;
27    finally
28      rs.free
29    end;
30  end;